Page:Buddenbrooks vol 1 - Mann (IA buddenbrooks0001mann).pdf/170

RV 158 (BUDDENBROOKS) The Consul came out of the office with his pen behind his ear as the brother and sister reached the entry, and stretched out his arms to his daughter.

“Welcome home, my dear Tony!”

She kissed him, looking a little shame-faced, her eyes still red with weeping. But he was very tactful; he made no allusions; he only said: “It is late, but we waited with the second breakfast.”

The Frau Consul, Christian, Clothilde, Clara, and Ida Jungmann stood above on the landing to greet her.

Tony slept soundly and well the first night in Mengstrasse. She rose the next morning, the twenty-second of September, refreshed and calmed, and went down into the breakfast-room. It was still quite early, hardly seven o’clock. Only Mamsell Jungmann was there, making the morning coffee.

“Well, well, Tony, my little child,” she said, looking round with her small, blinking brown eyes. “Up so early?”

Tony sat down at the open desk, clasped her hands behind her head, and looked for a while at the pavement of the court, gleaming black with wet, and at the damp, yellow garden. Then she began to rummage curiously among the visiting-cards and letters on the desk. Close by the inkstand lay the wellknown large copy-book with the stamped cover, gilt edges, and leaves of various qualities and colours. It must have been used the evening before, and it was strange that Papa had not put it back in its leather portfolio and laid it in its special drawer.

She took it and turned over the pages, began to read, and became absorbed. What she read were mostly simple facts well known to her; but each successive writer had followed his predecessor in a stately but simple chronicle style which was no bad mirror of the family attitude, its modest but honourable self-respect, and its reverence for tradition and history. The book was not new to Tony; she had sometimes been allowed to read in it. But its contents had never made the impression upon her that they did this morning. She was

RV 158 (158)